// 9TO5MAC — MOBILE & WEB
Camera app in iOS 27 reportedly includes four major pro photography features
Code reportedly found in the Camera app in the latest iOS 27 beta appears to point to the introduction of some major pro photography and videography features.
While the stock camera app has grown in power over time, the reported discoveries seem surprising for an app primarily geared to point-and-shoot usage …
Apple has historically tried to walk a tightrope between making its own Camera app extremely easy to use for snapshots while also giving some degree of creative control to those who like to use it as a more serious camera. Despite the gradual evolution of the app, however, most keen photographers and videographers tend to use third-party apps instead.
The reported introduction of some powerful features normally associated with professional cameras may well change this, if the discoveries do indeed turn out to be accurate. Developer pdfu says they discovered code supporting four main features not currently enabled in any of the betas.
Judging exposure visually can be extremely unreliable, especially when viewing the iPhone screen in bright sunlight. Most dedicated cameras support a histogram feature intended to provide an accurate depiction of the exposure, while video editing software tends to use a waveform as another way of viewing the same information. Pdfu says they have found code for both features within the beta.
1. Exposure scopesThe Camera app adds a complete implementation of waveform and histogram views. These can help users judge exposure in different formats.There is no consumer within the Camera app, but you can see a demo of all graphs against stock photos below. pic.twitter.com/0UBdKJtbMc
How much of a photo will be in focus between immediate foreground and far background depends on a number of factors, but for some shots only part of the scene will be in focus. Again, judging what is and isn’t in focus visually can be unreliable, so professional video cameras in particular use an approach known as focus peaking.
With this, you can enable an overlay where the parts of the photo in focus will be highlighted, typically in a red colour – though the example shown on the left uses yellow.
2. Focus peaking and highlight-clipping overlaysFocus peaking emphasizes edges with strong local contrast. Highlight-clipping can warn users about highlights that are becoming too bright.Once enabled in iOS 27, they can be rendered individually or together in the preview. pic.twitter.com/PLjalPkKJB
The biggest danger with getting the exposure wrong is overexposing. In general, if you underexpose the shadow areas, these can be recovered in post-processing – you’d have to get it very wrong for dark areas to turn completely black (an RGB value of zero). Overexposure is a much bigger issue as it’s very easy to blow the highlights completely – that is, the bright areas exceed an RGB value of 255 and cannot be recovered.